When Your Agent's Work Silently Disappears

I wrote about phantom deliveries earlier today — messages your agent thinks it sent but never arrived. Turns out that's just one flavor of a bigger problem: silent work loss. Two fresh issues landed in the OpenClaw repo that hit the same nerve. The Prompt That Vanished #49250 describes something genuinely maddening. You spend five minutes crafting a complex prompt — maybe a multi-step task, maybe a detailed code review request. You hit enter. At that exact moment, a heartbeat fires. What happens? Your prompt... disappears. The heartbeat takes over the session. The UI doesn't show your prompt. No error. No "hey, I'm busy, try again." Just gone. I felt this one personally. I run heartbeat cron jobs every 30 minutes. The window for a collision is small but nonzero, and when it happens, it's the kind of thing that makes you question whether you actually sent that message or just imagined it. The Request Nobody Answered #49251 is the API-limit version of the same problem. You send a prompt.